The Great Tortured Stephen Sondheim, Part III

Stephen Sondheim turns 75 on Tuesday, and Broadway is rolling out the mat to celebrate a lifetime of accomplishment. There is a great article in today's Toronto Star by Richard Ouzanian (The Two Sides of Stephen, Sunday, March 20, 2005) which does an excellent job of chronicling Sondheim's life and achievements. My favorite Sondheim quote:

The rest of the 1960s were a fairly desolate time for Sondheim. His next show, Anyone Can Whistle (1964), was a quick flop, to be followed by Do I Hear A Waltz? (1965), a collaboration with Richard Rodgers, the former partner of his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein.

The relationship between the two chilled rapidly after Sondheim told one journalist, "Oscar was a man of infinite soul and limited talent; Dick is a man of infinite talent and limited soul."

"You're always sorry, you're always grateful."

That description of marriage is more than just a lyric from Stephen Sondheim's 1970 musical, Company. It also encapsulates the philosophy of the man who turns 75 on Tuesday.

For 50 years, Sondheim has transformed a craft into an art, transforming what he called "the elegant puzzle" of songwriting into something capable of expressing profound thought and disturbing emotion.

In gratitude, the theatrical world is honouring him this spring with almost non-stop concerts, tributes, productions and recordings, including Sondheim musicals at the Stratford and Shaw festivals.

"Never judge a book by its cover/The thing that counts is what's inside," wrote Sondheim in Follies (1971), and that could well serve as a caveat for anyone attempting to examine his life's work.

The tunes may often be jaunty, fulfilling the need for artificial exaltation that musicals are supposed to provide, but the lyrics that ride on those melodies are drenched in melancholy, anger and regret.

In Sondheim's universe, the incurably romantic optimist is constantly being sacrificed on the altar of grim pessimism.

Sondheim has been given all the awards -- Tony, Oscar, Pulitzer -- but his greatest claim to fame may very well be that he is the first existentialist in the history of musical comedy, sharing his awareness that, in affairs of the heart, we are free to choose, but that freedom is also a curse.

So who is this man?

Those not blissfully cursed with a passion for show tunes probably know him best for his biggest single hit song, "Send In The Clowns," or for his lyrics to West Side Story, his first professionally produced work.

But there are nearly 20 other shows to his credit, whose themes include American imperialism (Pacific Overtures), cannibalism (Sweeney Todd), obsessive love (Passion) and political mayhem (Assassins).

His musicals have been set in exotic locales -- Japan, Sweden, Italy -- yet they often come back to America, more specifically to the city that nurtured and consumed him at the same time.

Stephen Joshua Sondheim was born on the Upper West Side of Manhattan on March 22, 1930. His father, Herbert, was a successful dress manufacturer; his mother, Janet Fox, was known by all and sundry as "Foxy."

His parents went through an ugly divorce when he was 10 (he refers in a lyric to one of the joys of marriage as "the children you destroy together"). Young Stephen found himself in the custody of Foxy, a woman so monumentally horrible -- manipulative, grandiose and capable of a wide range of emotional abuse -- that he fought with her all of his life and finally refused to go to her funeral.

It's no wonder Sondheim sought a surrogate family. He found one that would change his life.

Foxy's summer home was in Bucks County, Pa., a popular haunt of New York theatre folk. Her nearest neighbour was Oscar Hammerstein II.

The famous lyricist behind ShowBoat and Oklahoma! befriended the young man and invited him to work as an assistant on some of his shows, a classy laboratory where Sondheim could learn the art of musical theatre first-hand.

After earning a degree in music at Williams College and studying composition under Milton Babbitt, Sondheim made his first foray into the professional theatre with a musical called Saturday Night.

The unexpected demise of its producer, Lemuel Ayers, caused the show to be cancelled but, even at the age of 24, the Sondheim style was already formed. Lurking inside the perky title song is a reflection of unexpected bleakness: "Alive and alone on a Saturday night is dead."

Sondheim was subsequently asked to join heavyweights Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins and Arthur Laurents on West Side Story, which opened in 1957 to enormous acclaim and launched his career on a high note.

But the lush romanticism of the work, undiluted by any mitigating irony, is alien to the rest of Sondheim's creations, a fact he willingly admits.

He has often denigrated his lyric from "I Feel Pretty," where Maria sings "It's alarming how charming I feel," by saying, "She's supposed to be an uneducated Puerto Rican girl, but you know she would not have been unwelcome in Noel Coward's living room."

His next project was another lyrics-only assignment that drew Sondheim in because of the richness of the material.

Gypsy (1959) was ostensibly the saga of how burlesque queen Gypsy Rose Lee rose to prominence. In reality, it was a chilling portrait of the destructive powers of mother love as exemplified by the larger-than-life Rose -- a character who bore more than a passing resemblance to Sondheim's mother.

When Rose screeches, "Someone tell me, when is it my turn?/Don't I get a dream for myself?" one can just imagine how many times Sondheim heard those same words growing up.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962) was Sondheim's first solo show and a great big hit. Even though it is meant to be a rollicking farce, he still finds a way to undercut the merriment, as when he warns us, "Tragedy tomorrow, comedy tonight."

The rest of the 1960s were a fairly desolate time for Sondheim. His next show, Anyone Can Whistle (1964), was a quick flop, to be followed by Do I Hear A Waltz? (1965), a collaboration with Richard Rodgers, the former partner of his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein.

The relationship between the two chilled rapidly after Sondheim told one journalist, "Oscar was a man of infinite soul and limited talent; Dick is a man of infinite talent and limited soul."

Starting in 1970, Sondheim's work broke through to a new level with the series of musicals he did in collaboration with director Harold Prince.

Company (1970) dissected modern marriage with a surgeon's coolly elegant skill, whileFollies (1971) explored the success ethic of our society, reaching the conclusion that, "Sometimes when the wrappings fall/There's nothing underneath at all."

A Little Night Music (1973) set a series of waltzes to Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night in a style that Sondheim called "whipped cream with knives," whilePacific Overtures (1976) revisited Commodore Perry's conquest of Japan in supple, haiku-flavoured lyrics that summed up Sondheim's fatalistic attitude to life with the solitary phrase, "There is no other way."

Sweeney Todd (1979) remains his masterpiece, a bleakly funny tale of a revenge-maddened barber who slits the throats of his victims and then has his equally insane mistress turn their corpses into human pies.

"The history of the world, my sweet," he tells her, "is who gets eaten and who gets to eat."

The Sondheim-Prince partnership ground to a halt with the 1981 failure Merrily We Roll Along, which dealt with what happens when ideals get betrayed. It features a devastating insight into Sondheim's worldview:

"It's called flowers wilt

It's called apples rot,

It's called thieves get rich and saints get shot,

It's called God don't answer prayers a lot."

He next embarked on a trio of musicals with author James Lapine: Sunday in the Park with George (1984), Into the Woods (1987) and Passion (1994).

Although these later works are seemingly marked by more of a willingness to make an emotional connection, there is always something that clouds the horizon -- the hint of disillusionment that Sondheim splashes into potential happiness the way some people add a drop of bitters to their martinis.

Perhaps the apotheosis of these contradictory feelings occurs in Into The Woods:

"Sometimes people leave you

Halfway through the wood.

Others may deceive you

You decide what's good.

You decide alone,

But no one is alone."

Sondheim's willingness to engage the human heart at its most complex level may be the reason he has never enjoyed the enormous popular success of an Andrew Lloyd Webber, but, by the same token, it's the reason his work deserves our attention and respect.

His most recent lyric, for a revival of The Frogs last summer, demonstrates that age has not softened his approach. In a song where Dionysus recalls his dead wife, Ariadne, he sums up his feelings with an archetypal Sondheim line:

"And it fills me with joy/And it fills me with pain."

After 75 years on Earth, Stephen Sondheim is still sorry and still grateful.